Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [64]
At the Bakery, we create that Thanksgiving. We give the day off to as many of our staff as possible and do the cooking ourselves, working in near silence as we prepare the evening’s feast. We’ve both spent plenty of holidays cooking in restaurant kitchens, but at the Bakery, the restaurant kitchen is our own, and in its stillness we find a quiet rhythm to our work. Phil brines the turkeys and chops the vegetables; Michelle turns out desserts, cranberry sauce, and loaves of savory bread, shaped like a pumpkin, that she bakes in our wood-fired oven. In some ways, Thanksgiving is simpler than other days at the Bakery: everyone eats the same meal, so our menu is straightforward. We try to make food that reminds people of their own family Thanksgivings—comforting and familiar—but we also want to serve them the best Thanksgiving dinner they’ve ever had.
On Thanksgiving we make the Bakery itself look more like a home than a restaurant–albeit a home with table service and no cleanup duties. Erik builds a pyramid of retro-style canned vegetables on the mantel and dangles frozen turkey dinner boxes from the ceiling as a reminder of what is not being served that night. A fire crackles, and as we cook in the kitchen, Erik and Mike pile pumpkins in corners and scatter golden sycamore leaves, gathered from a nearby creek bed, across the tables and the floor.
Throughout the day the Bakery fills with smells of vanilla, nutmeg, and ginger as Michelle pours fillings into pie crusts—delicious concoctions of pumpkin and sweet potato accented with cinnamon and clove and spiked with white pepper. And then there are her Parker House rolls: delicate and light, baked close together in the pan so that they need to be pulled apart at the table. They take a lot of work—Michelle makes them only on Thanksgiving—but they’re worth it, twice-brushed with butter and perfect for sopping up Phil’s garlic gravy. Michelle used to hang a sign at the Bakery so that people could order the rolls for their own tables, but she got so many requests that now it’s only by word of mouth. Yet somehow, every year the list grows.
Photographs by Sara Remington
Sometimes it’s hard for us to appreciate our lives at the Bakery, when the road goes out or business is dead and we forget why the hell we decided to open a restaurant in Big Sur. But it’s times like Thanksgiving, when we’re surrounded by friends brought together over tables of our food, that remind us of how lucky we are. We choose our ingredients. We design our own menus. We’ve created a community at the restaurant that, in times like this, feels like family. For us, Thanksgiving in the Bakery is what it’s all about.
As any true fan of Thanksgiving knows, the meal hasn’t been a success unless it puts everyone into a coma afterward. Thank God, then, for the food. Starting at 3:30, heaping platters of Phil’s creations emerge from the kitchen and are set down family-style at tables full of hungry guests.
We don’t sit down to eat until 8:30, after everyone else has been served. There are usually a dozen or so people left by this point—our servers, our staff, and Big Sur locals who consider the restaurant a second home. We pull the tables together, Mike pours hearty glasses of wine, and then, finally, we get to enjoy what Phil’s been working on all day: butternut squash soup, stuffed turkey legs, long-cooked greens with onion and garlic, herbed mashed potatoes. Just when it seems impossible to keep eating, out come Michelle’s desserts: pumpkin and pecan pies, pear and quince crisp, apple confit, bread pudding. Thanksgiving is about tradition, not experimentation, so we limit our menu to food that people might see on their tables at home—only better.
As the evening wears on, we pass plates and make